Author: Susan Freiwald

Last week, Governor Brown signed the landmark California Electronic Communications Privacy Act[1] (CalECPA) into law and updated California privacy law for modern communications. Compared to ECPA, CalECPA requires warrants, which are more restricted, for more investigations; provides more notice to targets; and furnishes as a remedy both court-ordered data deletion and statutory suppression. Moreover, CalECPA’s approach is comprehensive and uniform, eschewing the often irrational distinctions that have made ECPA one of the most confusing and under-protective privacy statutes in the Internet era.

Extended Scope, Enhanced Protections, and Simplified Provisions

CalECPA regulates investigative methods that ECPA did not anticipate. Under CalECPA, government entities in California must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they may access electronic communications contents and metadata from service providers or from devices. ECPA makes no mention of device-stored data, even though law enforcement agents increasingly use StingRays to obtain information directly from cell phones. CalECPA subjects such techniques to its warrant requirement. While the Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Riley required that agents either obtain a warrant or rely on an exception to the warrant requirement to search a cell phone incident to arrest, CalECPA requires a warrant for physical access to any device, not just a cell phone, which “stores, generates, or transmits electronic information in electronic form.” CalECPA clearly defines the exceptions to the warrant requirement by specifying what counts as an emergency, who can give consent to the search of a device, and related questions.

ECPA’s 1986-drafted text only arguably covers the compelled disclosure of location data stored by a service provider, and does not clearly require a warrant for such investigations. CalECPA explicitly includes location data in the “electronic communication information” that is subject to the warrant requirement when a government entity accesses it from either a device or a service provider (broadly defined). ECPA makes no mention of location data gathered in real-time or prospectively, but CalECPA requires a warrant both for those investigations and for stored data investigations. Whenever a government entity compels the “the production of or access to” location information, including GPS data, from a service provider or from a device, CalECPA requires a warrant.